A million dead

Yesterday's world seems more and more remote — an exotic continent, almost another century — but the new one has never quite arrived and no one has yet glimpsed it.

When the news broke on January 11 of the first death as a result of a mysterious virus detected a few weeks earlier in the Chinese city of Wuhan, not even the most lucid of visionaries could have guessed what was coming.

No one imagined that, behind that 61-year-old man, 999,999 more corpses would accumulate due to covid-19 and that the exceptional - life with a mask and without kisses, teleworking, the hypothesis of shutting oneself up again at home, the fear of an evil that at the end of 2019 did not even have a name - it becomes routine.

Nine months later, according to the count carried out by the US Johns Hopkins University, the world is about to cross the threshold of one million deaths, much better armed than then to mitigate the lethal impact of the disease and with advances in obtaining the vaccine .

However, the number of infected since the pandemic broke out exceeds 32 million.

And countries that believed they had more or less controlled the epidemic and reduced deaths to a minimum face the fear of a second wave that will saturate hospitals again and lead to another confinement of the population after last winter.

Juan Antonio Dutoit holds the photo of his son, Juan Carlos, who died of covid at age 38 in Seville.

In video, the story of four relatives of coronavirus victims in different countries of the world.PHOTO: PACO PUENTES / VIDEO: VIRGINIA MARTÍNEZ, LUIS M. RIVAS

Testimonials: From Senegal to Jakarta, a diverse geography of pain

“We are not about to defeat the virus.

We will have to live with it and it will gradually fade through vaccinations and group immunity.

There will not be a dry cut that solves everything ”, says from Massachusetts the essayist Robert D. Kaplan, author of

(RBA, 2013) and specialist in geopolitics.

"There will be no victory parade."

One million is an arbitrary number that, isolated, means very little - "one dead is a tragedy, a million, a statistic", says the apocryphal phrase attributed to the Soviet tyrant Josef Stalin - but it is a number that allows us to evaluate how humanity It has reached this point, what has changed in these months not only on the health front, but also in international politics and the economy.

“I compare this pandemic with

Maurice Ravel's

.

The music is repetitive.

Instruments are gradually entering the score, ”says epidemiologist Antoine Flahault, director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

This was the case with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the virus that causes the covid-19 disease.

First it was China.

Then Korea and Iran.

Next, Italy and Spain.

And North and South America, and India.

And so on, until almost the entire planet is covered, like the

of the French composer's piece.

Almost half of the deaths have occurred in America, according to WHO data.

A quarter in Europe.

Asia, where the first cases jumped, registers 10% of deaths.

And Africa, with a young population, 2.5%.

The day with the most deaths in the world was April 17, with 12,421;

September 7, with 8,666, was the fourth worst.

Data analysis: One million deaths (which is more than one million)

Flahault reviews the horizon today.

From "low-activity" areas such as China, Japan, Vietnam or Thailand in Asia, or Australia or South Africa, to Latin America, which "faces an unprecedented health catastrophe", and parts of the US where the virus "is not in absolute under control ”.

In the middle, Western Europe, which in summer "experienced a paradoxical situation, with an increase in cases but not in deaths or severe forms of the disease."

"Now, in Spain and in France we are beginning to see severe forms that are increasingly numerous that are worrying because they are very similar to the start of a second wave," he notes.

"It cannot be ruled out that, if the second wave hits Europe, health systems are under such stress and that, to avoid their implosion, we will be forced to new confinements."

The trail of other pandemics

One million, what does it mean?

Is it a lot, a little?

Malaria caused 405,000 deaths in 2018.

HIV 690,000 deaths in 2019, up from more than 32 million since the 1980s.

The common flu kills between 290,000 and 650,000 people each year.

The flu of 1957 and the one in Hong Kong in 1969 caused a million deaths each, according to data from the US Center for Disease Control, but they have barely left a trace in the collective memory.

The usual comparison is with the 1918-1920 flu.

“The estimated global balance is approximately 50 million deaths.

It is the most cited figure.

In reality, we do not know the total number of fatalities, ”says J. Alexander Navarro, from the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan.

"That pandemic was and continues to be the deadliest in history."

"I hope that now is not nearly as bad as in 1918, but we should not celebrate that

a million have died," says David Quammen, author of

(Debate, 2020)

from Montana

.

“It is a horrible event that could not have been fully anticipated.

But it could have been better controlled if we had used our scientific knowledge and public health capabilities, with wise leadership, and the will to prepare.

We did not".

Photogallery: A pandemic that shook the planet

One million, is that a credible number?

"No no no.

Not at all ”, responds demographer Jean-Marie Robine, from the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED).

Only in France, he explains, there are three different and non-coincident sources.

"The figures are probably very inaccurate (...).

We are surely well over a million ”, he adds.

Robine explains that if the pandemic ends relatively soon, the demographic effects will be limited.

Life expectancy may fall by five or six months this year in European countries, but it would quickly recover as it has after epidemics and wars.

“If it is a one-time event, the impact will be less.

One million dead, on a human scale, is nothing, "he says.

“But, if the crisis returns with regular waves, it can have a big impact and prevent the increase in life expectancy.

It would be the end of the longevity revolution, ”she predicts.

In other words, the increase in the age to which human beings live, which has not stopped growing since the 1950s, would stop.

If the crisis returns with regular waves, it can have a large impact and prevent an increase in life expectancy

Jean-Marie Robine, demographer

The figures have become a political weapon, and a flag.

China, with three deaths per million inhabitants, South Korea with eight, or Germany, with 114, fare better in these nine months of pandemic than France (486), the United States (629) or Spain (668).

“I don't think it can be said that authoritarian countries have done better than democracies.

Asia has managed it well, whether it is a democracy like Taiwan or an autocracy like mainland China, ”says Kaplan.

"What we have seen is not democracies versus autocracies, but smart management versus foolish management."

The second globalization

Kaplan believes that the virus marks "an intermediate" between what he calls the two phases of globalization.

The first, which began with the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, was a democratizing and globalizing globalization.

The second is a globalization marked by the strength of autocracies and rivalries between powers.

"The actions of the Trump Administration have damaged the American prestige, and the position of China has been reinforced," describes the holder of the chair of geopolitics at Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“Much will depend on the presidential elections in the United States.

It is the largest independent variable that we do not know, the variable that can have the greatest geopolitical effect in Europe, in the Middle East, in the Far East.

Things will be clearer at the end of the year ”.

Kaplan talks about another phase in globalization, but not the end of globalization.

The lockdown disrupted the supply chains that were the nerve center of world trade and put an end to international travel.

The shortage of products that became essential, such as masks, led many countries to promote their national production so as not to depend so much on China.

The rapid spread of the virus around the planet made it easy to name a culprit: globalization.

The reality is more complicated.

The risk is protectionist geopolitical tensions.

It's what happened in 1929

Isabelle Méjean, Economist

"The idea of ​​a de-globalization caused by the coronavirus ... I can be wrong, but I do not have the impression that this is what is happening," explains economist Isabelle Méjean, professor at the Polytechnic School in Paris-Saclay.

And remember that, although the transport of individuals stopped, international merchandise trade continued to function.

“The risk”, he continues, “are geopolitical, protectionist tensions.

This is what happened in 1929. When there is an economic crisis, a sovereign reflex appears, of withdrawal, which can give rise to protectionist tensions that would be quite costly from the growth point of view ”.

The 1929 reference - and what came later due to the errors of the political and monetary power - is on the lips of many politicians and experts.

"The policy of the European Central Bank and the decisions of Europe in July are antidotes and, in a way, the best answer we could give," Macron said in a meeting with journalists in late August.

He alluded to the recovery plan of 750,000 million euros in subsidies and loans, and the massive intervention of the ECB with the 1.35 trillion euros of the asset purchase program.

“In the 1930s, after the crisis of 29, Europe did exactly the opposite.

We had tough monetary policies and tight budget policies for a time.

They lead to social and political chaos ”.

Nine months later, and a million dead, neither social nor political chaos have arrived.

The November 3 elections in the United States will be the great examination at the polls of the management in a crisis that is looking for culprits: those who did not anticipate anything, those who despised the signals, those who got into partisan fights and did not organize a system of tests and tracing, the citizens who have let their guard down, the conspirators.

At the same time, something unusual happens with this pandemic: humanity decided to stop in its tracks during the March and April lockdowns to save the lives of its elders;

without these measures it is likely that many more than a million would have died.

Today's anguish over the economic crisis — never have so many countries been in recession at the same time since 1870, according to the most recent report from the Gates Foundation;

37 million people have fallen into extreme poverty — it occupies more space in the minds of citizens and politicians.

But the health crisis is still far from resolved.

“I hope the worst is through, but we cannot trust ourselves,” explains Quammen, “Mortality rates have dropped, because we have learned something about how to treat it and how to control it.

But we have not yet experienced it in combination with the flu.

And, once we have it under control, another pandemic threat will come. "

"If a second wave comes during our cold season [in the northern hemisphere] between fall and into next spring, it will seem very long to us, but in the end it may be the end of the tunnel," says Flahault.

“Perhaps we will have achieved immunity in various segments of the population that will protect us from another new wave.

And we can hope that by then we will have a vaccine that will protect the elderly and health personnel or children who are not yet affected.

Winter will be long.

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Testimonials

From Senegal to Jakarta, a diverse geography of pain

The data

One million deaths (which is more than one million)

Information about the coronavirus

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• Coordination and format: Guiomar del Ser

• Art and design direction: Fernando Hernández

• Layout: Nelly Natalí

• Graphic edition: Carlos Rosillo




• Video

• Screenplay: Virginia Martínez

• Edition: Luis Manuel Rivas

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• Editorial staff: Virginia Martínez (Spain), Antonia Laborde (USA), Juan Carlos Sanz (Israel), Héctor Guerrero Ortiz (Mexico)

• Image: Carlos Martínez (Spain), Javier Fernández (USA), Quique Kierszenbaum (Israel), Mónica González and Nayeli Cruz (Mexico)